The Bright Forever (19 page)

It was Katie’s bare leg that he reached first. The skin was the color of ash. Raymond R. had cut her throat; the tips of her fingers were gone.

Her eyes were open—those green eyes—and that was what broke him. He knelt over Katie’s body, sobbing, with no one in the world to hear him.

He pulled his shirttails loose from his trousers, and he used them to clean the dirt from Katie’s eyes. Then he tried to think what he should do next. If he went to the police, the questions would begin: How did he know about this place? Why hadn’t he come to the police instead of going down to Honeywell by himself? Where was he last night? What did he know about where Raymond R. had gone? Had he been with him the night Katie disappeared? He didn’t want anything to do with those questions. He didn’t even think he could call Tom Evers on the telephone and keep his identity a secret the way he had that night when he called to say that Tom could find the truck he was looking for—in Gooseneck. He wouldn’t be able to say the words that he had found Katie and that she was dead.

But he had to do something. The sight of Katie’s hurt body was too much for him—that brown hair, those green eyes, the only things that looked to him like Katie at all. He took off his shirt and covered her. He tried to say a prayer. Then he sat there a good while, knowing he couldn’t stay there forever, knowing he couldn’t just walk away and not say a word about what he had found.

Finally, he decided he would go back to Tower Hill and tell Junior Mackey. They already had secrets between them, and Mr. Dees would ask him to let this be one more.

It came to Mr. Dees then that he couldn’t leave his shirt over Katie for someone to find, that he couldn’t leave her body out in the open where coyotes might worry it. He knew he would have to slip her back into the makeshift grave, and that was what pained him most of all, having to fill in the dirt and leave her. He put his shirt back on, even though it carried the odor of decay now, and he went back through the cornfield to his car.

When he finally spoke to Junior Mackey, it was on the telephone. He told him how he had taken off his shirt and covered Katie, how he had said as much of the Twenty-third Psalm as he could remember, the parts about green pastures and still waters, about fearing no evil, about goodness and mercy and dwelling in the house of the Lord forever.

“How did you know where to find her?” Junior asked him. His voice was all hollowed out as if he had already accepted that soon this moment would come.

“It was Clare Wright. Raymond’s wife. She told me where to look.” For a good while, there was only the sound of Junior taking ragged breaths as if he was trying hard not to weep. Finally, Mr. Dees said, “What will you do now?”

“I’ll do what any father would do. I’ll go get my girl. I won’t leave her the way you did.”

It hurt Mr. Dees to hear that—made him want to hang up the phone and be alone with that hurt—but he had to keep talking. He had to make something clear to Junior. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Trust me. Please. Call Tom Evers. Tell him where to go. Please, Junior, for your sake and for Patsy’s, let Tom see to what has to be done.”

A short time later, when Mr. Dees went into his bedroom to change out of his clothes, he reached his fingers into his shirt pocket to fish out his fountain pen and discovered that the pocket was empty, the pen nowhere to be found.

Mr. Dees

I
DIDN’T THINK
anything then about where that pen had gone, only that I’d lost it somewhere. You have to understand that I was still shaking with the fact that I had found Katie’s body, that I’d left her there in that grave. I could barely think what to do next. I stuffed my shirt into a paper grocery sack, carried it outside to my burn barrel, and set it on fire.

You’re probably thinking, That’s what Raymond R. did that Wednesday night, the fifth—burned his clothes. A guilty man covering his tracks. You’re probably thinking I’m like him.

But wait. We’re almost at the end. Stay with me just a while longer. What do you have to lose now? Please, don’t go.

July 9

I
T WAS MIDAFTERNOON
when the police car turned into Mr. Dees’s drive. He watched from the kitchen window as Tom Evers got out of the car. Another policeman was with him, and Mr. Dees recognized him as the one who had first questioned him on the night of the fifth, the fat-fingered policeman who had written with a hacked-up stub of a pencil.

“Mister Dees.” Tom Evers was knocking on the back door, and Mr. Dees thought for a moment that if he just kept quiet Tom would go away and not bother him. After a night and day when people required so much of him, he just wanted to do nothing and have everything be all right. “Henry Dees,” Tom Evers said, and he said it the way Mr. Dees would have said it had he been scolding a student who had misbehaved. He knew then he had no choice but to open the door and see what Tom Evers wanted.

It was the Comet, Tom said when he and the fat-fingered policeman came into the house. He wanted to have a look at it. Yes, right now.

Mr. Dees let the two men into his garage. The fat-fingered policeman looked down the sides of the Comet. “It’s been in mud, all right,” he said, “and not too long ago, I’d say.”

Mr. Dees stood in the sunlight, watching as Tom crouched down behind the car and ran his finger over one of the tires. He stepped out into the light and studied the muck on his finger. He raised it to his nose and sniffed at it. He showed it to the fat-fingered policeman, who smelled it, too. “Shale,” Tom Evers said.

That’s when the fat-fingered policeman said, “Should we show it to him now?”

“Yes,” said Tom, “I expect we should.”

They led Mr. Dees to the patrol car. Tom Evers reached in through the open window and plucked a small plastic bag from the dashboard. Inside the bag was a fountain pen.

“We know it’s yours,” Tom said to Mr. Dees. “Burt here.” He nodded his head at the fat-fingered policeman. “He remembers that you offered it to him the night of the fifth when he came to question you about Katie Mackey.”

“A Parker 51,” Burt said.

“We found Katie Mackey’s body down near Honeywell, and we found this pen with her in the grave.” Mr. Dees was standing with his back up against the patrol car. Tom Evers had his hand on the car and he was leaning in close to him. “Mister Dees, there’s footprints in a muddy field down there. A jumbled-up mess of prints. But we’ve got reason to believe two men made them. Two men going into those woods where we found Katie and two men coming out. On top of that, I’ve got a suspect someone bailed out of jail and now we don’t know where Raymond R. Wright is. You want me to keep going? All right, sir. Junior Mackey came to me shortly before noon, and he said a man had called him and told him where he might find Katie’s body. Mister Dees, I can’t say with any degree of certainty that the man who told Junior that wasn’t you. Things are starting to add up, and if I was you, I wouldn’t like the answers we’re starting to imagine, answers about you and Raymond Wright and what you had to do with the kidnapping and murder of Katie Mackey. I think you ought to talk, and this time I think you ought to make sure that you tell us the truth.”

Mr. Dees

S
O I DID
, and now I’ll tell it to you. I told Tom Evers that yes, I was the one who called to tell Junior Mackey that he’d find Katie buried near a junk heap—the letter
J
, Margot Cherry had said—in a wooded area off a shale road near Honeywell. I’d said there were footprints in a cornfield and they led back into the woods. How did I know it? I told Tom Evers I’d been the first one to find Katie, but I’d been afraid to come to him myself and say so.

When he asked me why, I told him I was a shy man. I lived a quiet life. I didn’t think it was my story to tell. It belonged to Junior Mackey. He was her father. I gave the news to him.

I said that Clare Wright had been the one to tell me where to look for Katie. “It came to her in a dream,” I said, and then I told Tom how one evening that summer she and Raymond R. had driven down to Honeywell and he had used his binoculars, claiming he was trying to see the smokestacks they were building at that power plant across the river in Brick Chapel. “She was too embarrassed to tell you she might have a clue after that mess with the snapshot of the Mackeys’ house, the one with Katie supposedly at the window. So she told it to me, and I went down there. People like Clare and me, we’ve never been anything. Now our lives are too much for us. We don’t know how to act.”

Then I explained that yes, I’d driven to Honeywell that morning, and I’d seen those footprints in the cornfield and a bit of Katie’s black T-shirt. I’d left my own prints in that field. “I won’t deny that, Tom.” I told him how I’d found the grave underneath a piece of rusted tin—that was the detail that made him start to believe that I might be telling the truth.

“Katie’s body,” he said. “What do you remember?”

I knew he was looking for the facts that someone would only know if he had been there.

“Her throat was cut,” I said, and I could barely get the words out of my mouth. “It was horrible, Tom. You’ve seen. Her throat was cut, and the tips of her fingers were gone.”

He nodded his head. “You’ve got the facts right, but that doesn’t prove you were the one who found her. I hate to say this, Mister Dees, but it could be you know those things because you were there when they were done.”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “Surely you don’t think it is.”

“For your sake, I hope not, Mister Dees. Now tell me, where were you on Wednesday night between eight-thirty and nine?”

“Is that the time it was done?” I asked. “Is that the time Raymond R. had Katie down that shale road?”

“You need to be able to account for yourself during that time.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Katie. Tom, I can tell you exactly where I was.”

July 5

H
E WAS UPTOWN
at the public library. There he put a book,
Henry and Beezus
, into the after-hours returns bin. The book had been checked out on Katie Mackey’s library card. It was nearly dark. He put the book in the bin and then he went home, not knowing that only a few minutes before, Tom Evers had gone to the home of the head librarian and asked her to please come with him to the library and open it up so they could see whether Katie had returned her books.

They hadn’t been checked back in, the librarian said, and Tom asked her to please look in the after-hours return bin to see if they were there.

The bin was empty. It was 8:33. Tom looked at his watch and jotted down the exact time in his notebook. He ran through the facts: Katie Mackey hadn’t come home, her bicycle had been left on the courthouse square, and now he had proof that she hadn’t even made it to the library. Something, or someone, had stopped her. That was when he first knew, with a certainty that chilled him, that he had a kidnapping on his hands. A little girl gone.

He asked the librarian to stay there awhile, to do another search for the books just to make sure they hadn’t been returned and perhaps shelved incorrectly. He had to run back to the courthouse to talk to the dispatcher, but he promised he’d be back shortly to see whether she’d been able to find them.

When he came back to the library, it was 9:07; again, he jotted down the time. Inside, the librarian was waiting. She slid a book across the counter to him:
Henry and Beezus.

She’d already checked the records, the librarian said, and yes, that was one of the books that Katie Mackey had borrowed. She couldn’t say with any accuracy when it had happened, but somewhere between the time that Tom Evers left to go to the courthouse and when he returned to the library, someone had put that book in the after-hours return bin.

“I checked again,” she said. “Just to make sure. You know how it is when you’ve lost something? You look everywhere you can think to look, and then you start over? I looked in the bin, and there it was, that book.”

The odd thing was, she said, Katie had checked out two other books,
The Long Winter
and
On the Banks of Plum Creek
. They were nowhere to be found, and Tom Evers didn’t know what to make of the fact that
Henry and Beezus
was in the bin when it had been empty the first time the librarian checked, and he didn’t know what it meant that the other books weren’t with it. Above all, he didn’t know who had put
Henry and Beezus
in the bin or how to go about finding the answer.

July 9

B
UT NOW
he had it, or at least a possibility, if Henry Dees was telling him the truth.

“I’m the one,” Mr. Dees said. “I put that book in the bin.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From Katie.”

“So you were with her? You saw her after you left her house that evening?”

“Yes.”

“You lied about that, Mister Dees. You said you didn’t see her after her lesson. You said you were at home all night. That’s what you told Burt when he came to question you. I’ve got it here in the record.”

“Yes, I lied,” Mr. Dees said, and he knew he would have to explain why.

It was a hard thing to say to Tom, this man Mr. Dees still thought of as the boy from his class. Tom, who was decent and aboveboard and kind. It was all Mr. Dees could do to confess that he had harbored a love for Katie Mackey, that he was a lonely man who knew he would never have a family of his own, and that in his dreams he fantasized that Katie was his daughter. His voice got small, but he looked right at Tom, met his eyes, and told him all of this.

“So you were fond of her?” Tom said.

“I loved her, Tom, but not like you might be thinking. I loved her so much it scared me. I’d never known I had a right to love someone that much.”

“When did you get that book from her? Where were you at the time?”

“Around five-thirty that night. Wednesday. I was walking home from the Heights and I’d stopped to rest on the courthouse lawn. That’s when I saw her over in front of Penney’s. She was having trouble with her bicycle. The chain had slipped off. She said she had to get her books to the library. I said I’d walk them over there, and then I’d come back and I’d help her. I got to the library and I turned back to see how Katie was doing with that chain. Tom, her bicycle was still there, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Well, I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe she’d ducked into one of the stores. I walked around the square looking for her. Then I sat down on a bench to wait awhile. When she never came back, I didn’t know whether to take those books back to the library or not. Finally, I decided I’d take them home, and the next day when I went to her house for our lesson, I’d bring them to her. But later, I noticed that they were due that day. Tom, that’s when I took those books to the library. I’ve already told you I couldn’t bear to let
The Long Winter
go. But
Henry and Beezus
? That one, I put in the bin.”

“Mister Dees, there was another book that Katie had checked out,
On the Banks of Plum Creek
. We’ve found pages from it in Raymond Wright’s burn barrel. You told Junior Mackey you had
The Long Winter
because Raymond Wright came to your house around midnight and the book fell out of his truck. Now it sounds like you’re telling a different story. Mister Dees, something still doesn’t add up.”